Forward to the Past

Last week things kind of came to a head.

My questing buddy suggested that we run a few Heroic Wrath Classic dungeons on her Warlock, and I agreed. I had hardly played a Mage in a couple of months*, so I grouped up with Linnawyn instead.

Then the fun began.

My questing buddy began fielding queries, complete with GearScore, and ALL of them asking "H+?"

"No, just Heroic."

"Oh."

This went on for quite a few minutes, and finally my questing buddy got disgusted and grumbled "At times like this I really hate this game."

I figured the grouping was going to be a lost cause, because H+ was all anybody ever seemed to care about --and don't give me any bullshit about how "there's plenty of people who will want to run normal heroics" because my experience has been exactly what we found that night**-- so I made a radical suggestion.

"How about we roll up some characters on WoW Classic instead?"

"You mean Classic Era?"

"Yes."

There wasn't even a moment's hesitation. "Sure!"

She delisted us and we immediately began discussing what server to try. I was the only one of the two of us to have copied our toons from original Classic, and I knew that the cluster of servers those toons were on were fairly dead, so I was open to trying other locales. That night we initially tried Bloodsail Buccaneers-US, which had a listing of "Full", but we quickly discovered that the RP server is the current home of the Hardcore Challenge for the Alliance side. When you have a line of 6+ people deep to kill the boss in Northshire Abbey starting zone at lunchtime, you've got a population problem. 

So the next evening we abandoned Bloodsail Buccaneers and tried the server cluster that Pagle-US is part of. 

We quickly discovered that this server cluster was more to our liking. The crowds weren't overwhelming, people weren't stealing each other's mobs, and we relaxed.

"We're off on the road to Darnassus..."
(Please tell me someone recognizes that line.)

The Gen Chat was relaxed in both the Night Elf starting area as well as the Human starting area, and it also had a dearth of people selling boosts and other assorted meta behaviors.

The second night on the Pagle cluster, we got into a group to run the Ban'ethil Barrow Den in Teldrassil, which is notorious for being hard to handle due to the respawn rates of the mobs inside the packed area. 

This is like the beginning of a joke:
"Three Hunters and a Rogue walk into a bar..."

Much hilarity and fun was had.

The next day, my questing buddy had a proposition for me: would I like to run to Mulgore with her? She wanted to get a chance for her Hunter to tame a lion there named The Rake, and she figured I'd like to tag along. I quickly calculated the path we were likely to take, as low level toons (around L10 or so), and replied, "We're going to die a lot."

"It'll be fun!"

"Then count me in!" I never let a little thing like death get in the way of seeing the wide world of Azeroth.

So we took the ship from Teldrassil to Darkshore, 

You know, I think we can do that.
Blizz got rid of that quirk in Wrath Classic.

ran the length of Darkshore to Ashenvale,

took the Talondeep Path through to the Stonetalon Mountains,

We died almost immediately after
this screenshot.

died a bit on the way, but we finally escaped Stonetalon and into the Barrens.

Who knew the landscape could be this beautiful?
All that's missing is a voiceover saying
"Welcome to Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom!"

"I hate what they did to the Barrens in Cataclysm," my questing buddy said.

We eventually did make it to Mulgore after dying a lot more, but alas I missed taking screenshots as proof. Still, it was an adventure made more real because we had to put in real effort to make it there. I mean, if this were Wrath Classic we'd likely have waited until we got to L20 and got riding, which would have made this jaunt a lot easier. Indeed, in Wrath Classic everything at the lower levels comes easier, but we'd have not likely gotten the satisfaction of making it through to Mulgore if it would have been so easy.

I will say that Shintar is correct in her assertion that the leveling cadence in Classic Era just feels right; you're not leveling so fast that you're choked by the lack of coin on you (Season of Mastery), or that you're plowing through content so quickly courtesy of heirloom gear and whatnot that you lose sight of all of the world around you (Wrath Classic). You're also not getting major rewards so early --such as riding-- that you forget how important of a step it is. 

"OMGosh! Bloodvine is important again!" my questing buddy gushed.

"And I can make my own poisons once more," I added, which earned a laugh. "Hey now, I missed that connection to being a Rogue. It's part of why I chose Alchemy on Az!"

"When was the last time we saw both Onyxia and Nefarian heads hanging in Stormwind?" My questing buddy mused.

And then I went and just had to do this:

"Lady Prestor is back!"

"What did you do??"

"I, uh, hugged Lady Prestor."

(Do you know how long it took for me
to wait for the throne room to clear
out for this screenshot? Better you not know...)

"Oh, the Windsor questline is back too!!"

"And no more Varian!"

***

The past few days, even the Pagle cluster has been so busy in these lower level zones that we've resorted to heading off and doing other things while we waited for people to split so we could quest a bit longer. Travelling to Darkshire for the flight point there or cutting across a zone that have enemies that will still aggro on you to gather mining nodes ("I'm NOT addicted!" my questing buddy insisted) are just a few of the things we got into trouble with in Classic Era.

It's a very weird feeling, seeing these zones so active when they were so totally dead from, say, mid-2020 onward, but this is a level of activity that is entirely organic. Blizzard did not directly create this demand by doing anything, this has been players coming back to Era on their own. I suppose you could argue that Blizzard did this by providing the greater Classic community what they wanted in Wrath Classic, but I'm not quite sure. After all, people did leave WoW entirely for other MMOs (such as Final Fantasy XIV) during Shadowlands' run in Retail, and the WoW Classic community has been embracing the meta for so long that people have simply just stopped playing. I know of a dozen people who stopped because they didn't like what TBC and Wrath Classic became; they never even bothered with Classic Era. But here we are, and Era is experiencing this renaissance in activity.

Will it last? I don't know. I don't even know if my questing buddy and I will continue to play Era in the long run, but there is hope that we will. We've already begun talking about potentially joining a guild that is going to experience leveling and raiding content as if we were all new to the game, and there is no shortage of guilds that are advertising exactly that. We can afford to be choosy, because we've been there before, and we know what we're getting into.

*I'd prepped Neve for a transfer off of Myzrael-US to Old Blanchy-US, and I wasn't inclined to do anything with her in the interim. Cardwyn... Well, Cardwyn I've hardly touched at all since the raid team broke up except to tailor a few bags here and there. And those few times I did get on I got whispered by some people in the now defunct raid team, asking how I've been and what raids I've been on. I'm polite enough, but I'm really not interested in hearing about all the raiding they've been on and all the loot they've gotten. In that respect I'm like our Bear tank on the raid team, who left WoW entirely when the raid fell apart. He'd committed a lot of effort to making that raid work, and then.... pffft.

**And if you listen to Trade/LFG chat or the Blizzard forums you'll hear people say "Oh, there's plenty of people who will run normal Heroics," but if that's the case, where the hell are they? I simply am not buying what people are selling, because as Folding Ideas put it, "We brought the bug back with us."